Re: st: data type question

[David Kantor <kantor.d@att.net>]

At 04:01 PM 2/18/2009, Rike wrote:
> when using "compress" to free up room in the memory, i see that some
> variables have their data types changed from byte to float. When I
> look at stata's help file for data types however, it says that "byte"
> takes up 1 byte, while "float" takes up 4 bytes.
>
> My questions:
> 1) why is it that stata changes data types from byte to float when
> float is supposed to take up more space?
> 2) In order to free up space, is it better to manually set the
> variable to "byte" when I generate them? (rather than compressing,
> that is)

1: This seems odd. Are you sure that this change occurs in 
-compress-? There are other events that can cause a byte to change to 
float, but as far as I know, -compress- should not do it.

2: I usually try to choose appropriate types for as each variable is 
generated. Aside from the space consideration, it is just more 
appropriate to use byte, int, or long whenever the values are known 
to be integers.

HTH
--David

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